The present invention relates generally to conveyors, and more particularly to the control, installation, and operation of conveying systems.
Conveyor systems are used in a wide variety of material handling applications. These includes such things as conveying luggage throughout airports conveying parcels through transportation terminals, conveying manufactured parts or components throughout factories, conveying inventory, sorting and conveying items to be transported, and various other applications. Such conveying systems may use conveyors having endless belts that are rotated around end rollers to cause the top surface of the belt to move in the direction of conveyance. Such conveying systems alternatively may use conveyors having a series of rollers, selected ones of which are driven to cause articles positioned on the rollers to move in the direction of conveyance. An example of one such roller conveyor is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,253,909 issued to Kalm et al., entitled MODULAR POWER ROLLER CONVEYOR, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Still other types of conveyors may use movable slats to transport articles, as well as other structures.
The installation and commissioning of prior conveying systems has typically been a labor-intensive process. The design and installation of prior conveying systems has often involved a great deal of custom engineering of the system in order to make the system match the physical layout of the customer's site, as well as match the conveying needs of the customer. Such custom engineering not only includes the physical aspects of the individual conveyors making up the system, but also the programming and control logic that is used to control the overall system. In addition to significant amounts of labor, such custom engineering and design requires extra time for the custom-designed parts and system components to be manufactured. The installation of conveying systems has therefore consumed a significant amount of both labor and time, all of which translate into increased costs for the customer of the conveying system. These costs, of course, are desirably reduced.
As noted above, one of the custom engineering tasks has been the programming of the conveying system controls. Conveying systems usually include a number of sub-systems that perform specific functions that must be programmed and integrated with other sub-systems. For example, most conveying systems will include an area where products or articles are loaded onto the conveying systems, either manually by a person or through some automated means. The loading of the product onto these areas may not always be performed as quickly as the conveyor operates, and it therefore may be desirable to program these conveyor beds to operate in a manner that accumulates articles. By accumulating the articles, less space between articles is used and the conveying system may generally operate more efficiently. In addition to the function of accumulating articles, another function that certain sections of the conveying system must be programmed to do is the merging of conveyor lines. Merging of the conveyor lines is carried out by programming the conveyors to operate so that articles from multiple conveyor lines are merged together without collisions. Conveyors systems also typically must perform the function of diverting articles from a conveyor line onto adjacent branch or take-away conveyors. This function is useful for sorting articles so that individual articles will arrive at desired destinations in the conveying system.
In the past, the software that controls the conveying system so that it performs functions has usually been a custom-designed program specifically tailored to a particular conveyor installation. The software is designed according to the specific number of conveyor lines entering the system, the number and location of merges, the number and location of the destinations that articles may be routed to, and a number of different factors that are specific to a given installation. Further, the location of the controls for each portion or segment of the conveying system must be determined, often manually. This may involve having a technician walk around to each control in the system and physically assign it a software address during the installation of the conveying system. These software addresses are incorporated into the software so that communications between the various control components can be properly implemented. Reducing the amount of time and labor involved in these tasks is highly desirable.